As digital marketers, the browser is our primary tool, our gateway to the Internet. If you belong to the sixty percent of our blog readers who use Chrome as their default browser, most likely this post will help you improve your work practices. In this post you will find tools to help you with SEO, content, social, design and more, including productivity extensions. If you have other extensions that the world should know about, please share them in Comments!
Before we go into practical details, allow me to provide some background: Google Chrome browser was launched in 2008, and after a period of ups and downs, began to gain popularity at dizzying speed. One of the reasons for the success of the browser, and for the fact that surfers from all over the world prefer it over its main competitors, is the huge variety of free extensions that can be installed that significantly increase the scope of work that can be done; from identifying the technology used to build the web page to which users surf, to the display of data from Google Analytics, summarizing the number of Likes / Shares that a particular page has, information regarding organic promotion, finding contact details, confirmation that the pixels inserted are working properly and more.
There are so many Chrome extensions, that sometimes it seems easy to get lost and difficult to know what is really valuable and what would just confuse us later on. For digital marketers, some Chrome extensions could save you time and some could give you a real edge over your competitors. I have compiled below a list of 21 Chrome extensions that digital marketers should know, with a brief description of what each of those can do.
1. Zest.is – an extension that displays in a new browser window links to content that digital marketing professionals have recommended.
Anyone can recommend original content or something they have encountered online; Zest.is extension is able to identify which recommendations originate from those who understand network marketing and that indeed this is content that would interest other marketers. The quality of content is guaranteed! Anyone adding the Zest.is extension to their Chrome browser can choose at any given time to enter the designated tab which is managed by the extension and find “hot” content there on network marketing related topics, which is divided into categories, such as “News”, “Automation”, “Recent Developments”, “Inspiring marketing campaigns” and more.
This extension is an excellent way for marketers to keep up to date, learn of innovations, original ideas, tips and a variety of information items that other marketers have found worthy of sharing. Highly recommended!
2. Tray Canned Responses – This extension will help you be more productive and save you hours on a weekly basis. With Tray you can stop searching through emails and docs for important information. Store all your pre-made responses, templates, contact info, proposals, links and images in one accessible place.
You can copy-paste and response easlily in Gmail, Whatsapp, live chat, doc or any other platform with one click.
3. Bitly – in general, this is an extension that allows you to shorten a URL with one click. Marketers need to share links quite often; with Bitly extension, you can create a shortened URL and share it directly from the browser, while monitoring the traffic. In fact, the extension for shortening a URL is one of a whole array of tools offered by Bitly, an array designed to put these links into action, while giving them easy names, sharing them and monitoring the traffic they generate. Any marketer who needs to shorten URL’s would benefit from implementing this effective extension.
4. HootSuite – an extension which enables using some of the features of the known tool to manage marketing on social networks, directly from the Chrome browser. With HootSuite, and its free Chrome extension, the Hootsuite Hootlet, you can search on social media at the same time as searching on Chrome, share on social media while browsing, create messages, highlight text or images, schedule posts (on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn), and more.
5. Google Page Analytics – installing this extension into the Chrome browser will allow you to receive data about the behavior of surfers on the page displayed in the browser. Some of the data will be displayed above the page and some on top of the page itself (as long as it is a site that embedded your analytics code). So, for each page you browse, you’ll have easy access to key data from the Google Analytics tools, provided that the page has such tracking. The extension displays information such as the number of page viewers, unique page viewers (first time visitors), average time on page, bounce rate, real-time data (such as how many visitors are viewing the page at the current moment), data regarding click patterns on links and buttons displayed on the page, and more.
6. LastPass – an extension which greatly upgrades Chrome’s basic capabilities for saving usernames, passwords, forms auto-fill, credit information, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. LastPass enables managing passwords through one main panel. The extension allows you to automatically save contact information when used in the page displayed in the Chrome browser. From that moment onwards, you can easily re-access from any device which is synchronized with your Google account and / or your LastPass account.
7. Awesome Screenshot – as a network marketer, you probably need to share screenshots from time to time. With this useful extension, you can not only do it easily but also, while you’re there, highlight, circle, enlarge, add comments to, etc. the screenshot that you are forwarding.
8. Grammarly – this extension gives additional protection from typos, spelling or grammar errors. This extension checks almost everything you type on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Gmail, Twitter and more. Grammarly can identify words that are not misspelled, but are being used the wrong way. For the avoidance of doubt, this extension is used for the inspection of writing in English only. This is a smart extension that knows how to offer good formulations, this way helping you to write more impressive texts.
9. VidlQ – an extension that shows data about YouTube videos to let you learn what makes certain videos viral, examine the performance of videos you upload, and help you produce videos that get more views, faster, and generate more buzz. An interesting statistic, for example, is Velocity, an up-to-date, real-time rate of hourly views. Other important data is average viewing time, number of shares on various platforms, data on the presence and quality of SEO tags content and more.
10. Eye Dropper – surely at some time, you happened to see a color that seemed to fit a particular purpose you had in mind. With this nice Chrome extension you can select and save any color you encounter on a page displayed by the browser. The colors are stored in your own “Color History” repository, from which you can export data to a CSV file.
11. Tag Assistant – a very useful extension which enables checking the implementation of various Google tags such as the Analytics tag, conversion tracking tags, re-marketing of Google Adwords campaigns and more. With the Tag Assistant you can conduct “test navigation” to the page displayed in the browser and receive data about the operation of various tags, this way you can ensure that all tags are working properly, or troubleshoot any issues found.
12. OneTab – an extension designed to make life easier for people who during their work accumulate a large number of windows simultaneously open in the Chrome browser. Clicking on the OneTab icon will convert all the windows that are open to a list; from the list you can reopen each window individually or all at once. Using this extension allows you to save processor and memory resources, so you can greatly improve response speed and progress more efficiently.
13. Giphy – an extension that allows you to easily add GIF images to e-mails, posts, or any other content you work on. The extension provides access to a database of images that are permitted for use. You can search and view the database according to different categories. Found a suitable image? Simply drag and drop where you want it to appear.
14. Check My Links – an extension which allows a quick check of all the links appearing on the page displayed in the browser. A very useful extension for developers, designers and content editors who work on a particular page and want to make sure that all the links in it work properly. By using this extension, you can get a list of URL’s of broken links that have been detected.
15. MozBar – an extension by Moz, designed to display data on the status of sites and pages in terms of organic promotion (SEO). For example, you can get data regarding authority scores (Page Authority, Domain Authority), number and types of links (Internal, External, Follow or No-Follow), conduct searches according to location or search engine characteristics and more. The extension displays data about pages displayed in the browser as well as a list of pages on a search results page (SERP – Search Engine Result Page); the data can be exported to a CSV file.
16. NoFollow – as its name suggests, this extension highlights Nofollow links on the page displayed in the Chrome browser. The extension will also detect tags that affect the value of links from that page such as Nofollow tags, Noindex tags and other Googlebots, Bingbots, msnbots tags and more.
17. Rapportive – adds a social, professional dimension to the emails that arrive in your Gmail inbox. Some even use it for customer relationship management (CRM) activity. Rapportive displays, along with the email, data about the sender, an image, interests, location, occupation, and more. The information is taken from sources such as the LinkedIn profile, activity in MailChimp, Facebook, Twitter and more.
18. Pablo – an extension by Buffer, into which you can enter any text or image (right-click on them and choose to open in Pablo) and then edit them easily to fit for posting on different social platforms such as Pinterest, Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
19. BuzzSumo – allows you to evaluate the popularity of the page opened in Chrome by viewing data on Shares, Likes, Pins (on Pinterest), and +1 (on Google+). Interestingly enough, this extension allows you to get a statistic evaluating Twitter Shares, even though this statistic is no longer officially provided by Twitter themselves.
20. Save to Pocket – when you see something while you’re browsing Chrome and you want to save it and get back to it later, Save to Pocket is the extension you want. Saving any page with a click will sync with all your devices (tablet, Ios, or Android), this way you can easily access the content at your convenience. You can also add tags, get recommendations for similar content, and more.
21. RiteForge – an extension designed to improve by one click your posts on a variety of social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite, Buffer, Sendible, and more. The extension is able to associate an appropriate hashtag automatically, insert an image, call on an action, and more.
22. Feedly – once you’ve entered pages into your Feedly, you can easily share them by e-mail, on Facebook, on Twitter, save them in Evernote, access them later, and more. In fact, it’s an extension designed to make it easier to manage RSS (Rich Site Summary or more commonly known as Really Simple Syndication).
In this list, I tried to introduce extensions from different areas. I hope you will benefit from these extensions. If you know other cool extensions for Chrome, please share!
Highly driven entrepreneur, co-founder of Poptin and Ecpm Digital Marketing. Nine years of experience in the digital marketing field and internet project management. Graduated with a Law degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
A big fan of A/B testing, SEO and optimization, CRO, growth hacking and numbers. Enjoys testing new advertising strategies and tools and analyzing the latest start-up companies.
